WebMetro Relies on Resilience - Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

1/10/2009

Carlos Ugalde is the founder and chief executive officer of San Dimas-based WebMetro. Since 1995, Ugalde has been helping companies develop and implement online business strategies, build new e-businesses and provide clients with solutions to increase market penetration.
Ugalde has been directly involved in the management of WebMetro's larger scale e-commerce projects, including marketing strategy and direction.

This includes clients such as Pratt and Whitney Canada, the Student Assistance Foundation of Montana, and Public Storage. He also manages WebMetro's technology development efforts, including WebMetro's proprietary software DSMM.

Ugalde holds a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and is a registered professional engineer.

He recently took the time to answer Six Questions:

Question: How is WebMetro's business doing in this recession? Are you doing anything to help curb the effects of the economic slump on your business? Are you seeing the same pullbacks online that brick and mortar companies are experiencing?

Ugalde: WebMetro has been fortunate during this recession as our business has grown by over 20 percent in 2008. Our good fortune can probably be attributed in large part to the overall resilience of the Internet economy and our aggressive efforts to maximize the return on our clients' investments. As a matter of fact, our clients' investments in online marketing have increased by over 58 percent in 2008, outperforming the overall industry forecasted growth by more than 100 percent.

Q: How did you get into online marketing? And how has the reality of the business differed from your original expectations? What are you the most proud of?

Ugalde: After selling a prior company in 1995, I fell in love with the potential I saw in the Internet as a medium capable of bringing together marketing, distribution and technology into a single entity. However, at the time, no one, including myself, was clear as to how this would work and how we could make money online.

In late 1997, after almost two years of research, we opened our first full-service Internet Center in Pasadena. We offered three different services, which included an online Internet software store, an Internet training and self-service center and Internet consulting and marketing services.

The financial and personnel demands resulting from the multiplicity of services offered, coupled with marginal revenue from some of those services during the first couple of years caused us to streamline our services and concentrate our resources on Internet marketing and e-commerce development services.

I am most proud of the fact that we were able to streamline our services early enough to survive the dot-com debacle and that we were pioneers in the shaping of Internet marketing services in the United States.

Q: Where do you see the Internet in five or 10 years? What new technologies and tools are on the horizon?

Ugalde: During the next 10 years I see a much higher integration of mediums and appliances such as mobile, TV, radio, etc., all being accessed from a single device (laptop, cell phone, etc.). The technology is already in place, but it needs to make sense in a business context and gain wider acceptability among consumers.

Q: What should small business owners do to take advantage of the online marketplace? What should they avoid, and how should they measure their success?

Ugalde: In a general way, almost every business today should have a Web site that depicts the company in its very best light as potential clients or customers, prospective employees, vendors and partners are most likely to get their first glance of your business through your Web site.

This means that if your Web site does not present a professional image or lacks the clarity of what your business does and how it is different from others, you may never be able to capitalize on the Internet as a powerful business weapon.

If your business already has a Web site that you are not very proud of, you should seek a professional agency's assistance. Demand to see samples of their work and access to client references you can talk to. In the short term, it may be more expensive than hiring your friends or siblings, but the payback will be substantially higher over time.

In early 2008, I wrote an article that can still be found on our Web site (webmetro.com) titled "Can your Internet Marketing Stand the Test of a Recession?" In that article I indicated that businesses should realign their online advertising tactics by:

 Shifting their online marketing budgets more toward direct response initiatives (pay per click, SEO, etc).
 Reduce fixed online marketing expenses and consider outsourcing.
 Leverage social networks.
 Beef up their competitive intelligence.

As the recession has deepened even more over the last few months, businesses should assign a higher priority to aggressive promotions and providing stronger customer support. I believe that during a recession, maintaining or growing market share is more valuable than trying to maintain higher profits.

Measuring your success on the Internet is far more precise than with almost any other marketing investment. You can track visitors, find out what pages on your Web site they have visited, how much time they spend on your Web site, what they intend to buy and much more. This will enable you to evaluate the content of each page and ultimately give you a very clear picture of the return on your investment.

Q: What challenges have you faced over the years? How did you overcome them?

Ugalde: Convincing people about the validity of your ideas is a challenging effort. You must be prepared to go at it alone for a while until your ideas start gaining acceptance. Believing in yourself and your ideas coupled with a great deal of determination and dedication are the tools that have helped me overcome this key obstacle.

Q: Where do you see WebMetro in five years? Expanding?

Ugalde: Last summer we opened our second office in New York, initially as a sales office. We plan to expand through acquisitions and/or mergers over the next five years, and we will continue expanding our services to include public relations and branding-related interactive services as well as social media marketing.

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